Contents

Introduction

Our Emerging Leaders group, consisting of Miranda Bennett, Rebecca Blakeley, Jody Gray, and Amanda Ros, was charged with helping the ALA Recruitment Assembly improve and market their Library Career Recruitment Clearinghouse wiki. Our charge included six expected outcomes:
1) The Clearinghouse wiki will be better organized and easier to use.
2) The Clearinghouse wiki content will be more robust and up-to-date.
3) The Clearinghouse wiki will be more dynamic with interactive discussion among individuals who participate in or want to learn how to participate in library recruitment.
4) The Clearinghouse will be better known to members of the library profession.
5) The Clearinghouse will inspire more people to participate in library career recruitment initiatives.
6) The ALA Recruitment Assembly will be better known to members of the library profession.
These expectations shaped our approach to the project, which we began discussing at the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia and worked on between then and late June’s ALA Annual Meeting in Anaheim.

ALA Midwinter

At the ALA Midwinter meeting, all the members of Group F attended the day-long Emerging Leaders workshop and had the opportunity to begin planning for the recruitment wiki project. We had already introduced ourselves over email, but we were glad to meet face-to-face and get to work. At this initial meeting, we laid out the first steps we would take to get the project off the ground, divvied up responsibility for major parts of the project, and became more familiar with the work of the Recruitment Assembly.

Our first challenge was figuring out the mission and goals of the ALA Recruitment Assembly and determining the purpose of the wiki as it existed at the time. We had discovered that several parts of the wiki were severely affected by auto-spamming (Fig. 1), and part of the introduction to the wiki appeared to have been written by someone opposed to work of the Assembly (Fig. 2). We decided that eliminating existing spam and establishing a way to prevent further spam attacks were top priorities, and we would address the question of the strange introduction at the Recruitment Assembly meeting later in the conference.

We also knew that, in addition to the wiki, the Recruitment Assembly had a standard website version of the clearinghouse. This was an earlier version of the resource and was on its way to obsolescence. We decided to divide the sections of the website among us to check for any significant links that did not get migrated to the wiki. We planned to work with Julie Brewer, a Recruitment Assembly representative and our project mentor, to ensure that only those links the Assembly wanted moved would appear on the wiki.

In addition to discussing specific first steps toward improving the wiki, Group F identified several major parts of the project and determined who would be responsible for each. Based on our self-identified strengths and interests, we decided Rebecca would oversee the project as a whole and maintain regular contact with our group mentor; Amanda would add updates on our progress to the Emerging Leaders wiki; Jody would design the poster; and Miranda would draft the final written report.

We left the Emerging Leaders session confident that we could tackle the project and meet the expected outcomes, but we still had questions about the work of the Recruitment Assembly. Fortunately, Rebecca and Miranda were able to attend the Assembly’s meeting, where we had the opportunity to discuss the project with Julie Brewer and other Assembly members. At this session, we learned that the current introduction to the wiki was likely the work of a disgruntled librarian and did not describe the intended purpose of the wiki. We also talked to Assembly members about encouraging more contributions to the wiki by providing help pages and decreasing spam by requiring a simple registration and log-in procedure. These were added to our list of first steps for the project.

January-June 2008

During the six months between ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual, Group F strove to improve the Recruitment Clearinghouse wiki by eliminating spam, adding help pages and a registration requirement, searching for additional relevant content, and reorganizing some sections and subsections. We maintained communication primarily via email, although Miranda and Rebecca did meet once in person, simply because travel plans happened to take Miranda to Louisiana. Throughout this time, Amanda summarized our work in monthly updates on the Emerging Leaders wiki.

Our work was guided by the expected outcomes provided in our charge. For example, we sought to make the wiki “better organized and easier to use” by renaming some sections and adding basic “how-to” instructions (Fig. 3). We also sought to make the content “more robust and up-to-date” by identifying websites relevant to career recruitment but not yet on the wiki. For this part of the project, we selected a few broad categories of organizations and institutions likely to sponsor recruitment efforts (state library associations, specialized library associations, and LIS schools) and each searched for examples from a particular category. We were pleased to turn up many examples of recruitment initiatives that made great additions to the wiki.

We were also able to use our searching to identify a targeted audience of individuals and groups who would probably be interested in the Recruitment Clearinghouse and the work of the Recruitment Assembly. We collected email addresses as we searched and then sent information about the wiki, including an invitation to participate in and publicize it, to those addresses. In this way, we accomplished two additional expected outcomes: “The Clearinghouse will be better known to members of the library profession,” and “The ALA Recruitment Assembly will be better known to members of the library profession.”

As we neared completion of the project, we began preparing for the ALA Annual Meeting in Anaheim, at which we would present a poster summarizing our work and submit a final written report. Our poster, expertly designed by Jody, will be supplemented by live demonstrations of the wiki (assuming internet access is available and functional), a PowerPoint program of screenshots, and giveaway bookmarks featuring the wiki address.

ALA Annual

At the ALA Annual meeting, we all plan to attend the Emerging Leaders program on June 27. We look forward to participating in the poster session and showing off the work we have done over the past six months.

In addition, some of us will be able to go to the Recruitment Assembly meeting, where we will discuss our project with assembly members and offer suggestions for the future of the Recruitment Clearinghouse wiki.

Project Evaluation

On the whole, Group F members were satisfied with the results of the Recruitment Clearinghouse wiki project. We clearly met several of the expected outcomes, including better organization and content for the wiki and greater awareness of both it and the Recruitment Assembly among members of the library profession. Whether the wiki will be “more dynamic” and foster “interactive conversation,” and whether it “will inspire more people to participate in library career recruitment initiatives” are more difficult to measure and remain to be seen. We hope that by improving usability and visibility of the resource we have at least moved toward these outcomes, if not unequivocally accomplished them.

Our communication throughout the project was generally good, with Rebecca providing helpful oversight and Amanda keeping careful track of our progress. Relying almost exclusively on regular email to keep in touch was convenient, but on a future project of this nature use of project management software might improve overall coordination.

Looking back at our initial meeting and the decisions we made in Philadelphia, we can see that we all followed through on our responsibilities, and we could rely on each other to complete the major tasks we had accepted. Even without knowing one other well, we established a level of trust within the group by meeting deadlines and staying on track with our individual assignments.

We were lucky to have received a project assignment that allowed us to make a real difference for a group within ALA. It was easier to stay motivated when we could see actual changes to an important resource than it would have been had we been given a charge that might lead to nothing more than a theoretical proposal for change. In addition, we all appreciated the opportunity to learn more about an ALA organization with which we were previously unfamiliar. We hope the Recruitment Assembly is satisfied with the work we have done on the Recruitment Clearinghouse wiki and that the resource will serve the group well in the future.